1. You’ll want the right sort of chairs, so that your beauticians can carry out their treatments, and for clients to sit in whilst having their hair cut. With different sizes, styles and colours available, you’re bound to be able to find the chairs for your salon.

2. Your reception furniture is important as it is the first impression of your salon that your clients get. If your sofa is old and worn out, or the chairs are mismatched and wobbly, it won’t fill new clients with confidence that you can cut hair or perform treatments well.

3. Treatment couches need to be comfortable so that clients can relax fully whilst they are being pampered. Choosing adjustable couches will mean that your beauticians will be able to be at the right height to work their magic.

4. Your styling chairs need to be adjustable, and comfortable too. With some clients spending a long time seated whilst having their hair done, they’ll need to be able to relax, and let your hairstylists get on with creating the right look.

5. If you’re offering products for sale, or have product literature, then you’ll want to make sure that you have some display stands. Giving products their own space can help make them more attractive and desirable, so that you can encourage more people to buy them, or take a brochure.

6. Your salon hairdryers need to be top quality, as they will be in use, all day every day. As well as performance, you’ll need to thing about weight, nozzles, and cord length, so that your hairdryers have all the flexibility you need for drying hair in your salon.

7. Ensuring that you and your staff have the right hairdressing scissors is important. You’ll need your staff to have a range of different sizes, styles and perhaps left handed scissors as well.

8. Hairbrushes and combs can also make a difference to a hairstyle, and you might want to offer brushes for sale to your clients, as well as making sure that your stylists have the right brush for the hair style they are creating.

9. If you offer hair removal in your beauty salon, then you’ll want to make sure that you have the right sort of products, whether you offer waxing or electrolysis.

10. You might offer tanning products, such a spray tans or self tans, and tanning accelerators. You’ll want to know that you’re offering a good quality tan, whether you’re spray tanning in a booth, or your clients are using self tan at home.

Now you know more about what sort of hair and beauty products you need, have you got the right salon equipment?

There are thousands of productivity tips and tricks out there, each with varying levels of success and utility.

While these tips can help us shave a couple of minutes off of every hour and make certain processes easier, they often end up holding us up, tricking us into thinking our lives are more optimized than they really are, and betray the true meaning and philosophy behind productivity.

The best way to maximize personal productivity isn’t to invest your time in hundreds of tips and tricks, micro-optimizations and minor changes — it’s to completely overhaul the way you work.

That starts with employing some kind of philosophy to your work. Whether that means dividing your day time between work and personal time, or sectioning off time periods for uber-efficient and focused work, doesn’t matter.

What matters is that those changes produce some kind of measurable output. Invest in the mindset that gets you working hard and measure your output mercilessly. Discard the information that micro-changes can bring you and instead focus on the things that truly matter: behavior and setting.

For some, the best way to maximize personal productivity is by spending their work time in a setting that produces results for them.

For others, setting isn’t a problem, and a greater change to their work behavior and style is required. Whatever the case, these major changes are what introduce huge increases in productivity, not the tiny tips and tricks that only shave second off every minute and fool us into thinking we’re more productive than we really are.

Focus on those big optimizations, ignore the small stuff, and watch your work output massively increase.

There’s a sea of information out there, and the secrets to personal productivity don’t rest in embracing it; they rest in selectively ignoring it.

How often have you said to yourself, “If only I could get twice as much done as I do now!” The good news is, you can… as long as you have the right method and the motivation to change. In this 3-part series, I’m going to teach you a step-by-step method that will allow you to double your personal productivity in just 30 days. Actually, you could do it in a week, but I prefer to allow for the fact that most people aren’t very consistent at applying new information!

1. Scheduling the Time:

As I emphasized in Part-1, you want to schedule your High Value Tasks (HVTs) for times when your mental and physical energies are at their peak, usually first thing in the morning, although that varies from person to person.

Your next decision is how much time you want to set aside for a given task. In general it’s pretty hard to stay focused for more than one hour of solid working time, so dividing your working time into one hour chunks is a smart way to go. Then, even if the task you’re working on takes two hours to complete, you need to schedule at least a 10-15 minute “stretching break” in between your two one-hour chunks to ensure you’re at your best when you start the second round.

The next vexing question is when to STOP working. Do you quit when you say you’re going to quit, no matter where you’re at, or do you plow ahead until, come hell or high water, you’ve completed your entire tasks?

This is where many people get into trouble. The danger of plowing ahead is that you can end up just working and working longer and longer, until your whole day disintegrates into an undifferentiated mass of low-productivity work. And you DO NOT want that. On the other hand, completing a task has such a huge psychological payoff that you won’t want to stop if you’re close to the finish line. So how do you resolve this conflict? Just apply these guidelines:

1. When you’re scheduling a task, first determine how you’ll know when you’ve finished it! Since you may well be working on a sub-task – one component of a larger task – admit that to yourself and make sure you specify what determines completing the sub-task rather than the larger task.

2. Then determine how long the task will likely take. Then add at least 25% as a safety net – most of us consistently underestimate the time we need.

3. If the task can be completed within a one hour time chunk, then you work at it until it’s completed.

4. If the task is a longer task or a more “creative” one where it’s difficult to say how long it will take, then you stop working after your allotted time expires, no matter what.

2. Preparing Your Workspace:

Make sure your work area is clean and neat: a messy environment will compromise your productivity. Be sure to lay out any documents you’ll need in advance and make sure you have any electronic documents or web pages you’ll need open and ready before you begin. Otherwise, you may spend the first 10 minutes of your “working time” just digging up these items and becoming more and more frustrated.

Next, turn your phone’s ringer off and send all incoming calls to voice mail. If you’re in an office and have an assistant, make sure he or she knows you don’t want to be disturbed. If you’re working from home, negotiate with your family so they know to leave you alone as much as possible when you’re really working.

Also, close your email, your Twitter, your instant messaging and any other means of electronic communications you have. If you’re really serious about doubling your personal productivity, you MUST be willing to make your self 100% “available” to your work for defined periods of time, and that means making yourself 100% unavailable to the demands and interruptions of other people while you’re doing a blitz on your HVTs.

3. Before You Start:

Now that you’ve prepared your physical workspace, it’s time to spend a few minutes on your mental workspace. Going into a task fully motivated will significantly improve your productivity, a lesson every athlete knows all too well.

Find whatever inspires you in your work. It could be success stories in your industry, a book about personal effectiveness, time management or productivity, or simply the vision of what you are working towards. Then spend a few minutes reading or thinking about this until you feel “in the zone”. But don’t stop there…

Close your eyes and visualize yourself working on your task. Make sure you FEEL how easily you’ll complete it and the feeling of personal satisfaction that comes from that. Once you can feel all that, then you’re truly ready to begin.

And once you begin, have a timer or stop watch nearby so you can play “beat the clock” – a phenomenal method for keeping your relentlessly focused on the task at hand.

All these preparations – which most people simply skip over – are absolutely critical to doubling your productivity. Without them, no matter how well you’ve prioritized, your execution will be second rate and the time it will take you to complete a given task can easily increase by 3-400%. So resist the temptation to dive into your work without doing these preparatory steps first. At first these steps may seem tedious but once they’ve become a habit for you, you’ll understand how essential they really are.

Join us next time for the third and final installment of this 3-part series on how to double your personal productivity in just 30 days, when I’ll share with you the strategic secrets of flawless execution.